response 53 of 151:

Nov 17 04:20 UTC 2000

Before using terms like "wrong" wrt grammar, it is best to define the context.

When writing for a business or otherwise professional audience, it is grossly
inappropriate to write "Me and my wife were talking the other night." OTOH,
it's fine to say that, and ok to write it in more informal contexts.

Professional writing is a dialect of English. As such, it should be treated
like one -- there are settings in which it is the most appropriate means of
communication, and settings in which it sounds completely out of place.
Perhaps the striking difference between professional writing and any other
dialect is that there are few who speak it naturally; most have to learn it,
although many learn it from exposure rather than explicit teaching.

Language is extremely powerful, and how you speak, write, and even perceive
language can be used as a tool or a weapon. We'd like to think that language
doesn't matter that much, that it's fine to be casual, but using slang and
sloppy language in a business setting is like wearing a t-shirt and jeans to
a board meeting... you will be treated as the bumpkin you are, for not knowing
the rules, just as you will be scoffed at for showing up at a goth bar in a
three-ppiece (non-black) suit.

In other words, what jerry said.

response 55 of 151:

Nov 17 04:29 UTC 2000

True enough.

response 57 of 151:

Nov 18 03:32 UTC 2000

I try very hard to speak as I write since it's good practice and makes me
sound more intelligent.  ;-)

response 59 of 151:

Nov 20 15:05 UTC 2000

Me, I mostly agree with folks and stuff.

response 61 of 151:

Nov 20 18:08 UTC 2000

  Meditation might be more useful than mediation if that's your goal.
  Or was that just an example of disagreement with "stuff":  in this
  case a disagreement between you and your keyboard?  :-p

response 63 of 151:

Nov 20 18:35 UTC 2000

Yeah, but usually you say "I'm like" as a predecessor to something you said
or thought *at the time*...

It's more like saying "I said" or "I thought"...

response 65 of 151:

Nov 20 18:39 UTC 2000

Oh..

        I sghould also point out that education no longer, (it snarled
        with me years ago), teaches wtf the punctuation MEANS and is FOR.

        And, if they ain't teachin' that it MEANT and IMPLIED pauses and
        breaths: they is WRONG.

        (Find an English Teacher that can manage Olde Englische)

response 67 of 151:

Nov 21 01:23 UTC 2000

I don't have my English teaching certificate yet, but I can manage Olde
English just fine.  =)

response 69 of 151:

Nov 21 03:15 UTC 2000

No one ever taught me punctuation or grammar.  Nor did I consciously go
out and learn it on my own.

I have some sense of what nouns and verbs are, but not what "preposition"
means.  Apparently prepositions are "little words" of some kind.  I don't
really care.

response 71 of 151:

Nov 21 04:35 UTC 2000

Knowing how to use nouns, verbs, and prepositions is part of knowing a
language, and there are indeed two ways to learn it: through immersion,
and through a formal class.  Generally immersion is best, but a formal
class does have certain advantages.

Proper punctuation is part of written literacy, and that is one of the
things people generally do learn through a formal class.  Immersion
doesn't work nearly as well for this because one doesn't usually get the
sort of immediate nit-picking feedback necessary for immersion learning.

Knowing how to use prepositions is certainly something one can learn
without ever having conscious knowledge of what they are, but being able
to recognize a preposition may make it easier to do proper punctuation,
or to learn a foreign language.  For instance, without a knowledge of
prepositions, the sentence "I give to the dog a biscuit" sounds like
something a non-native speaker might say, that will sound wrong to most
native speakers.  Someone who has gone through a course of grammer will
be able to say that sentence is a "<subject> <verb> <indirect object>
<direct object>" and that either the <direct object> needs to come
before any <indirect object>s, or in some cases, the preposition can be
deleted if the right word order is used: "I give the dog a biscuit".  As
native speakers, most of us learned all this stuff well before we
learned what year it was, even if we couldn't articulate what we knew.
However, being able to apply proper punctuation to the sentence "I gave
the dog a small dark biscuit before breakfast" isn't quite so obvious
and being able to defend that decision really does require some
knowledge of grammar.

I hate to think what sort of schooling Larry got.  I remember *years*
worth of drill in prepositions, nouns, adverbs, Isadora Duncan, and all
that.  I can't say that it all stuck, and I still think there's got to
be a better way to do it all, but what stuck does seem to have been
useful.  This is certainly one of the things that makes me really
despair of there ever being any real hope for public education, however
much I might like the idea in the abstract.

response 73 of 151:

Nov 21 16:16 UTC 2000

(I still think language immersion is a fad.)

response 75 of 151:

Nov 21 17:10 UTC 2000

        *sigh*

        Punctuation is based on the "rules" that a "town cryer" would have
        to employ to "quote" the author of a document. The period, colon,
        semi-colon, comma, hypen - all of this implies breath-control and
        pause-length.

        Spelling is something *I* do by spelling a word over & over..
        Until it "looks right". The other rules? I've never seen anyone
        get excited about most of them unless they were an English major.
        Indeed, I can only remember the basics of noun, pronoun, verb..
        object, subject.. Mostly because they relate to programming.

        Shall we switch now to component/decompositional comments?

response 77 of 151:

Nov 21 22:25 UTC 2000

"To each their own." (sic)  GAG ME!!!